New Zealand tourism industry pins hopes on ‘Hobbit’

POWER OF THE RING:The country was caught off guard by the tourism explosion the ‘Lord of the Rings’ caused and awaits a similar surge, despite weak economic indicators

AFP, WELLINGTON

From a giant, bug-eyed Gollum sculpture looming over passengers at Wellington Airport to promotional banners covering the facades of entire office blocks, the upcoming The Hobbit movie is impossible to ignore in New Zealand.

Tourism chiefs, hoping to recreate the surge in visitors inspired by the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy, have launched a massive marketing campaign around director Peter Jackson’s latest Middle Earth three-parter.

Like the first trilogy, The Hobbit movies use New Zealand’s mountainous scenery as a backdrop, amounting to what some tourism insiders gleefully describe as a nine-hour long advertisement for the country’s rugged charms.

Tourism New Zealand chief executive Kevin Bowler does not go that far, but says the films offer the country invaluable global exposure that can be converted into increased visitor arrivals.

“We aim to show potential travelers that the fantasy of Middle Earth is in fact the reality of New Zealand,” he said.

Yet behind the hype, official figures show the first of the new movies, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, cannot come soon enough for an industry struggling for momentum almost a decade on from the original Middle Earth saga.

New Zealand’s international visitor jumped from 1.5 million to 2.4 million between 2000 and 2006 on the back of The Lord of the Rings, but have remained flat at about 2.5 million for the past four years.

A recent Tourism Industry Association report expressed concerns New Zealand had “lost its edge” and was no longer regarded as a must-see destination.

“New Zealand is perceived to have fallen off the global radar as a desirable destination to some extent,” the report found. “In part, as a result of increasing competition from other destinations, and in part because of economic conditions in [tourist] generating countries.”

The earthquakes that devastated Christchurch last year and a local currency pushing record highs have also not helped matters.

Tourism operator David Gatward-Ferguson said that when the first Rings film was released in 2001, the industry was surprised by the influx of visitors wanting to travel to places featured in the movie.

“We were initially caught out, yes, and geared up over the next year or two to meet demand,” he said, recalling a time when the currency was at a 25-year low and international travel was buoyed by a booming global economy.

With the entire tourism industry abuzz over potential spin-off benefits from Jackson’s latest project, there is little chance operators will be wrong-footed when the first Hobbit film premieres on Nov. 28.

Tourism New Zealand has changed its “100% Pure” global branding to “100% Middle Earth,” and Wellington has dubbed itself “The Middle of Middle Earth” for the premiere, contributing NZ$1.1 million (US$905,000) to the event.

Middle Earth coins have been minted, Hobbit stamps issued and Air New Zealand is running an in-flight safety video full of orc, elves and wizards.

The New Zealand government is so convinced of the benefits to the tourism and movie industries that when a union dispute threatened to send filming offshore in 2010, it amended the country’s industrial laws to ensure it stayed.